The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has presented the 2001 A.M. Turing Award, considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing," to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard of Norway for their role in the invention of object-oriented programming, the most widely used programming model today....

The discrete event simulation language (Simula I) and general programming language (Simula 67) developed by Dahl and Nygaard at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, Norway in the 1960's, led the way for software programmers to build software systems in layers of abstraction. With this approach, each layer of a system relies on a platform implemented by the lower layers.